Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday July 26, 2011 @08:03AM
from the inflection-point dept.

thomst writes "Space News reports that NASA has given tentative approval for SpaceX to combine the two remaining flights designed to prove the Hawthorne, Calif., company can deliver cargo to the international space station, according to William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, although formal approval for the mission is still pending. If NASA does approve the plan, SpaceX's Dragon capsule would be the first civilian spacecraft actually to dock with the International Space Station. According to NASA spokesman Joshua Buck, the current plan calls for SpaceX to launch a Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Nov. 30, which would then rendezvous and dock with the space station on Dec. 7 — a day that would live in spaceflight history."

It's unmanned, but fully pressurised. Even without additional oxygen, there'd be more than enough air for a single person to last the few orbits demo flight #1 completed before re-entering and landing safely.

And the G forces during flight are always acceptable to humans?There are facilities for dealing with human wastes, and medical emergencies? There's communications equipment?Or would the human basically be a Laika?

There is no rush to send humans before developing much more effective remote-manned and robotic systems.

Speak for yourself. There are a number of us working in the space industry who are eager to take part in human exploration of space because being trapped on this single rock for the rest of our lives is just plain boring.

Yes, unmanned. Flying multiple ISS rendevous missions for cargo only (unmanned) will help build up a flight history of the Dragon that SpaceX can point to and say, "See, we haven't blown anything up yet! Let us put humans on it too!"

Of course, if SpaceX does start blowing stuff up, that will have some effects on how they are percieved by the public, NASA, and Congress (who already mostly hates them).

When SpaceX and Bigelow meet in orbit, that will be an important date in spaceflight. Two wholly private ventures meeting in orbit.
Now if someone could just throw enough coin at both of them to undertake a Mars mission...

...Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics are commercial enterprises, which happen to have lots of contracts with both military and civilian agencies of the USA and other governments.

Last time I looked, NASA was one of those civilian USA government agencies...

Put it this way - when was the last time you could buy shares in NASA (paying taxes doesn't count)?

Yes, the shuttle was such a civilian space craft that it received much of its re-design mandates directly from the US Air Force.

The shuttle was a military craft, re-designed to satisfy military objectives. The fact that it was administrated by a combination of civilian and DoD authorities, hardly qualifies it as a civilian craft.

Surely NASA is a "civilian" space agency, and the shuttle therefore a civilian craft?

No, numerous design decisions early on in the program were made strictly to appease the defense dept. Most of them revolved around the mission requirement of launching, grabbing a russian spy sat and placing it in the cargo bay, and landing on next orbit. This requires a ridiculous cross-range capability as the launching site rotates with the earth about 2000 miles east during an orbit. Also the DoD mandated some weird on orbit maneuvering capability which I don't remember (probably some classified anti-asat maneuverability, or maybe it was something to do with the RCS system being stable enough to stick a telescope in the cargo bay for military observational purposes?)

There was also a long cross range capability for military purposes... If a civilian is worried about landing short, just aim at the center of the USA and you're all good. Insane as it sounds, if you want to land at a military base in Japan or Israel, and its a no-go for weather or whatever, you need crossrange to... somewhere freaking far away. What, Korea or Australia as alternates for Japan, or maybe... diego garcia as an alternate for israel? Unlike F-16s etc we never sold any shuttles to Israel or even landed ours in Japan. But the DoD made us design the vehicle to possibly do it.

The point wasn't to actually steal russian sats, which would be quite the diplomatic incident. The point was to scare them into a higher orbit out of SS range. Same sat higher up means lower resolution and less consumables means its got less lifetime and/or costs more. You only have to scare them once, during design phase, and their sats are crippled until the next generation. Presumably we wouldn't steal our own sats, and they were not going to make a clone of our SS (although turns out they did anyway) so in true cold war deterrence fashion, the end result of building the SS to DoD specs means the russians inherently end up with crappier spy sats than we do.

Well, we never did a mission like that, never even flew a super long cross range landing, for most of the active flying SS program the USSR no longer existed, it got really popular to put a giant sat with giant optics and long lifetime in geosync instead of little ones in low orbit that deorbit relatively rapidly. So it was all kind of pointless.

I wonder what SpaceX are aiming at. Is the privatization really going to be cheaper?

From their website, SpaceX is planning on selling Falcon9 Heavy launches for $80-125 million per. Since the Falcon9 Heavy has a payload of 53000 kg to LEO, sounds like they'll be charging less than $2400/kg

Also throw in the fact that SpaceX is NOT incorporating reusability into their price points (from what I have seen, the boosters are designed to be recoverable but the cost structure isn't built around that being an expectation for each launch)...and now all of a sudden the price point becomes lower. Musk said recently the propellent costs for a Falcon 9 launch were around $150k. If he can get a 50% reuse rate of of his boosters, that's a hell of a cost savings AND drives the cost to orbit down much lower.

Ite is the SME(Shuttle main egines) that cause the bulk of the work. They have to be pulled torn down inspection and tested for every flight.Yes the rest of it gets inspected too. But you dont rebuild your car engine every 30k miles either.

Russian buran didnt use SME just bigger boosters.

Now if some one can just make a 1 newton ion engine for space manuvering we will be all set.

If you listen to the MIT Open courseware series where they had lots of presenters talk about the designing and building the shuttle, one of the engineers talks about the fact the Shuttle was designed without autocad, just blueprints. He also mentioned that if diagnostics wiring had been included in the main engines they could be tested without removing them from the shuttle.

Actually, the bulk of the costs IS the rocket and the support crew, not the rest. SpaceX has the SMALLEST number of ground crew. And if they manage to put up 6 F9s without issues, I think that we will see insurance costs plummet on both the F9 and FH. And comm is not that much of the mission.

To put it bluntly: everyfuckingwhere. They got one thing very, very right: distaste for subcontractors. They figure they can control quality and leadtimes better if they do things in-house, and they don't have to support other companies' profits. It's simple, but it works wonders. There are plenty of simple business strategies that work very well out there, it seems.

Of course, the privates only got into business after the government spent lots of money developing the technology. I wonder if we would have put so much as a man in space if we were completely dependent on private funding.

zero chance. In fact, the goal here is for private space to take on launches to LEO and multiple LEO space stations. Before 2020, Bigelow wants to be back on the moon. However, it will not be private space that puts man on asteroid or crosses the void to mars, first. It will be NASA. However, once done, it will be private space that will commercialize it and make it CHEAP for all.

It is for those reasons that I reject arguments from ppl that pit private space against NASA. BOTH ARE NEEDED. NASA does the

Proving reliability will be the main task of cargo delivery. 13 unmanned flights of the Dragon would be enough to do that. For perspective: that's twice as many unmanned test flights as the Shuttle, Apollo and Gemini had among them. However, first SpaceX must deliver. (That doesn't mean that none of those flights must fail. But they better come up with some very good analysis if one does. Especially, whether the crew could have bailed out or not.)
Reuse is a non-issue both in terms of cost and material. First of all: The Dragon is as reusable as the Shuttle. But: it requires a much smaller (probably non-reusable) rocket to get into space. What you see under the bottom line is not what you reused, but what you didn't.

Launching an 80t Space Shuttle (plus fuel and payload) wastes 2x90t in solid rocket boosters (plus fuel). Those could in theory be reused 20 times, but weren't (it's too costly to do). But even if those numbers had been reached, it would amount to 9t per flight. (In practice, it's on the order of 40t per flight). Then, you have to account for the external tank - 26.5t. The empty Falcon 9 weighs on the order of 30t - including tanks and engines to launch a 3t (or so) Dragon (plus fuel and payload).
So yes, the reuse quota is worse - but the amount of waste is less.

The shuttle also wasn't exactly maintenance free. Especially the SSME (main engines) had its turbo pumps replaced regularly and the engines themselves as well. 46 SSME were produced for 135 flights at a cost of $45mio per engine or $15mio per flight (plus cost for spare parts, disassembly, reassembly, check-ups of the engines after each flight etc. - no idea how much that cost, but given the labor-intensity of those tasks, it must have been millions for each flight). Add to that the cost of the solid rocket boosters, handcrafted tiles to replace the old ones etc...

But worst of all: The shuttle weighs 100t (with max payload) and carries only minuscule amounts of fuel itself. It can't reach higher orbits. In fact, the orbit that the Shuttle can reach is so low that the friction of the atmosphere necessitated regular lifting maneuvers that can now finally be reduced by 70-80% (fuel comprised a large part of the payload that the ISS has required so far) - by lifting the whole station into a 100km higher orbit (which is a trivial orbit to reach for any spacecraft, except for the Shuttle).
It's even worse for Hubble. It's in such a low orbit, that observations with it have been described by astronomers as akin to riding a bicycle over a cobble-stone road while trying to hold a telescope steady. And that's before you consider that it regularly has to deal with a huge planet getting into its field of view during observations. It could never reach its full potential (and you've seen what it did despite that!) And that wasn't at all necessary. The KH-11 spy satellites that have very similar dimensions and exactly the same optics as Hubble were flown into space using a Titan IIIE missle - which could have brought the telescope into a much higher and reasonable orbit.

For any regular rocket reaching a somewhat higher orbit is no problem because you get rid of the 2nd stage when you're in orbit. You can even replace the payload by a 3rd stage(*) - but the Shuttle itself is the second stage (minus the external tank, weighing about 1/3 of the shuttle) and has a hard time getting rid of itself.

(*) Yes, you can do that with the shuttle, but the results are laughable compared to the insanely huge rocket you're launching to do that. What's the point of launching a 2600t Shuttle in order to place the same amount of payload into a geostationary orbit as a 300t Soyuz rocket? Most of all: what's the point of risking the lives of 7 people to do what is regularly done with unmanned rockets?

But what your tortured numerology [wikipedia.org] obscures is that while the 'waste' is less - much less is accomplished. The Shuttle could deliver 34klbs to the ISS, while Dragon delivers only 13klbs. Nor can Dragon provide crew exchange while delivering cargo. Nor can Dragon deliver modules. Nor can Dragon deliver experiment racks... (Shuttle can do all of this in a single flight!)

The Leonardo module (not the Rafaello) was destined to become a permanent module on the ISS on Atlantis' last flight so it was not loaded fully with cargo. It normally carried about 9 tonnes, or three times the load of an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule. The modified Leonardo module did have some parts from the unused Donatello module on board though to adapt it for permanent attachment to the ISS.

As for the crewing levels, the Dragon capsule doesn't support spacewalks for external operations at the ISS as

But what your tortured numerology obscures is that while the 'waste' is less - much less is accomplished. The Shuttle could deliver 34klbs to the ISS, while Dragon delivers only 13klbs. Nor can Dragon provide crew exchange while delivering cargo. Nor can Dragon deliver modules. Nor can Dragon deliver experiment racks... (Shuttle can do all of this in a single flight!)

The last flight had 9,403 lbs of net payload on board (wrapped in the Rafaello module that was in the payload pay).

a) Please use metric units. We've lost one Mars mission because of that silliness (and others) already.

b) The payload of the Shuttle is mostly irrelevant. It brought an average of 11.6t into orbit. That's 25500 coconuts or something - far short of the maximum payload and in order to reach that average, it must have flown with no more than a few thousand pineapples mass in its cargo bay on a lot of occasions. Besides, ten Falcon Heavy will cost as much as a sing

But, we have shot ourselves in the foot by getting rid of the Space Shuttle, instead of complementing it. With the shuttle, we had a sledgehammer to do everything from driving rebar to hanging pictures. With Dragon, we'll have a tack-hammer to hang pictures, and absolutely nothing more.

The analogy breaks down because all we're doing is hanging pictures. I never understood the point of the expensive tool that does everything poorly (or as in your analogy, are used for the wrong purpose just because they can) rather than a collection of specialized tools that do their assigned task very well.

And keep in mind that once you count the total cost of Shuttle operation, each launch has cost about $1.5 billion. Even worse, those prices hold with the only flight schedule proposed, two launches p

Missions that are too heavy to fit within the load envelope of Dragon don't necessarily need a Shuttle. ISS modules and other heavy infrastructure can be lofted on an unmanned Falcon 9 (or Falcon 9 Heavy, if you really need to shift some weight). Between Dragon, ATV and HTV the need to bring equipment racks to the ISS is covered.Satellite repair has been done 10 times, 5 of which were to Hubble. The cost of these missions was so high that it's generally cheaper to launch a new satellite than to send up a Sh

Sure. But for the $8bn that the launch and service missions cost alone - without taking the cost of the upgrades or the telescope hardware into account - they could have build a fleet of at least half a dozen of those telescopes on the ground with proper optics, pay for their operation and launch costs and gotten away cheaper than they did with Hubble.

It bears remembering that if this had happened we could never have installed the correction lenses for the misshapen mirror, and Hubble would've been pretty much completely useless.

As tp1024 noted [slashdot.org], they could have bought a lot of copies of the Hubble telescope for the repair costs. Most of the Hubble's cost was development and Shuttle mission costs. This approach means that most of your development costs are spread over many vehicles rather than just one. And you aren't paying for expensive Shuttle flights.

They could have dealt with problems like the gyroscopes as well (which caused so much trouble over the years) by upgrading those over the years as telescopes are launched. And as

The ISS is run by an international partnership, under various Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs). Any bets that the Russians won't submit lots and Lots and LOTS of "safety concerns" documents, to maximize the time they are the sole means of access to the ISS?

Economically and technically, this combination of tests is a win-win. The longer flight required to accomplish both phases of testing (rendezvous and docking) will be a much more significant test of the Dragon's capabilities and endurance. The test regimen will still proceed through all required testing steps, likely with a pause for analysis between the two phases. It also saves the money required for a separate launch and may well accelerate the first operational flight of an unmanned Dragon supply veh

At a fraction of the cost! If this doesn't show how competition in the private sector is miles ahead of any State enterprise, I don't know what doeS!

The first one is always free (or cheap).

It's called a loss leader, to bring you in the door. When there are only one or two space "providers", it will become much more expensive to use the "private sector" than it will to let the government fund it.

Plus, we'll end up with the government subsidizing these space corporations that sell us space flight. Exactly w

Riiiight, because SpaceX is a giant, well-funded corporation that can afford to take massive losses on its first few launches in order to lure us away from the competition. Except in this case the competition is Russia who is definitely very expensive, and SpaceX is a (fairly) small startup reliant on NASA funds run by an engineer, not a businessman. So, no, its not a loss leader. They can't afford one. The private sector just really does do things cheaper than the government, due to less bureaucracy, inert

The private sector just really does do things cheaper than the government, due to less bureaucracy, inertia, and congressional district appeasement.

But they require a significant profit, which pretty much makes the savings due to "less bureaucracy, inertia, etc" moot.

Look what having private industry involved with the has done to the cost of health care. No better than other developed countries at three times the cost. Just so a relatively small number of people can make a nice profit off of sick people.

Look what having private industry involved with the has done to the cost of health care.

I'm old enough to remember the 1970s. Government services SUCKED: poorly done and took forever to complete. That's why so many people were in favor of privatization.

Do a bit of research into government-run PTTs [wikipedia.org]. Their inefficiency is why cellphones became so popular so quickly everywhere except the USA, where ATT was motivated by profit to quickly lay lots of wire and connect lots of customers.

The thing about health care that no one seems to mention is the cost of R&D for drugs. FDA approval costs well upwards of half a billion, and can take 10 years. AFAIK many new drugs are developed by US based companies, and are protected by patents that may only apply in the US (certainly not everywhere). The result is that to recoup that cost, they need to charge Americans more for even basic health care. I have absolutely no figures for how much that cost is, but I imagine its considerable. Plus, Ameri

Let's look at it this way: I painted my house a few years ago and it needs a fresh coat. I already have a basic understanding of what needs to be done, the layout of the house, and the materials needed to complete the job (as I have done it before). Is it cheaper to paint my own house or to hire a painter to do it? Privatization dictates that it is both cheaper to let the painter do it and that I should also allow him to run it as a bread and breakfast while it is being painted.

Privatization dictates that it is both cheaper to let the painter do it and that I should also allow him to run it as a bread and breakfast while it is being painted.

I see part of the problem right here. You don't understand what privatization means, A privatized service merely means that you have a private entity do it, not that you allow them privileged access to other government services (for example, turning your government house into a bed and breakfast). So the correct analogy is that a commercial painter paints your house instead of government you not that you give some stranger unconditional use of your entire home as part of the process of painting it.

The paint analogy just doesn't hold water. You might be able to paint a house, but can you solve multi-dimensional nonlinear differential equations? I certainly can't. I'd have to hire someone to do so. The reason that private enterprise tends to be cheaper is because private sector workers are less unionized (7%) than public sector workers (36%). In this situation, you don't know how to paint your house. The question is whether you hire the unionized, bonded, insured worker or whether you hire the il

Let's take the obvious counterexample, food distribution. In most of the world, it is entirely private from the farmer or herder, through to the grocerer and restaurant. It is, of course, heavily regulated in most of the world, but that is a common feature of privatized markets, that they remain regulated to some degree.

Having studied the long distance industry as a management consultant in the 90's, I've seen perhaps half a dozen graphs that chart the precipitous drop in the cost of long distance calls from the breakup of AT&T through 1996. It dropped from something like $1 per minute in 1984 to a $.05 per minute in 1996. Now it's wrapped into an all-you-can eat sort of plan so it's hard to compare. I believe in that case that privatization has worked, although re-consol

OK yes you have a tangible example of gov't subsidizing telecoms. There's also the Universal Service Fee, although I don't remember where that money actually goes. But what about my point about long distance costs? You'll need to refute that in order to argue that telecom privatization hasn't worked. When you say privatization doesn't work, by implication you are arguing that our phone service would be better and/or cheaper if AT&T still had a monopoly on communications services, which is patently rid

OK yes you have a tangible example of gov't subsidizing telecoms. There's also the Universal Service Fee, although I don't remember where that money actually goes. But what about my point about long distance costs? You'll need to refute that in order to argue that telecom privatization hasn't worked. When you say privatization doesn't work, by implication you are arguing that our phone service would be better and/or cheaper if AT&T still had a monopoly on communications services, which is patently ridic

Privatization is not a scam. However, one of the biggest reasons NASA was overpriced was the procurement process. In order for NASA to spend money they had to spread it around as many Congress Critters' districts as possible, which introduced massive wastes. One of the ways defense contractors win their bids is to similarly "spread the wealth" across as many districts as possible of key Congress members so they can win spending votes. I suspect it is only a matter of time before the private space indust

That's not magic. They are run by competent people, and it has nothing to do with competition. Heck, they are, in fact, pretty much monopolists in their market niche. They have complete vertical integration -- all of the profits are basically theirs, because they try to make all the custom parts themselves. The big boys are so slow to change, that they'll be using their political clout to get contracts as long as they can while being run over slowly but surely by SpaceX. It's reckoning time for "big" boys a

Sure, once NASA had done all the research, a private company can take that and do the last stage cheaper. When a private company lands on the moon (or something else that NASA/JAXA/ESA has never done) then I'll buy your competition argument.

NASA has done amazing things and should continue to do so. My hope is that delegating the easy stuff (low earth orbit) to the private sector will save enough money to fund next level stuff like the amazing James Webb telescope, more Mars missions, etc.

Where's the one example? There's no mention here of cost.Also, how multipurpose is the Dragon? The shuttle was meant as a LEO swiss-army-knife, not necessarily the cheapest, but it could do what was necessary for LEO tasks.

And for all we know, NASA isn't paying that much, in part, because the DRAGON was already funded, and the manufacturers were more interested in recouping part of the cost than the whole cost. if anything it's more of an example of cooperation being financially viable. Two separate goals,

Cooperation and competition aren't mutually exclusive, even in business relationships. See for example Microsoft and SUSE; they are direct competitors in the OS arena, yet they cooperate on certain things. Microsoft contributes Hyper-V driver code to Linux, code which improves the competitiveness of a rival platform under certain conditions, because it feels it gains more in promoting Hyper-V and getting people to use that than it loses in getting Linux to run at a comparable speed and functionality to Wind

Also, how multipurpose is the Dragon? The shuttle was meant as a LEO swiss-army-knife, not necessarily the cheapest, but it could do what was necessary for LEO tasks.

If the Shuttle truly "did what was necessary, "it'd be a whole lot cheaper. The problem as you remark on is that it did a whole lot more than what was necessary and that in turn was a significant driver of its costs.

And for all we know, NASA isn't paying that much, in part, because the DRAGON was already funded

By who? NASA already is the prime funding source. And it's worth noting that a NASA group has already examined SpaceX's finances and determined that a traditional NASA contract to do the same thing that SpaceX did through the launch of the Dragon capsule would be about a factor of ten higher tha

Here's a link [transterrestrial.com] to my cost claim. I was in error. The cost calculated was just for the Falcon 9 development (including Falcon 1 development).

Under methodology #1, the cost model predicted that the Falcon 9 would cost $4.0 billion based on a traditional approach. Under methodology #2, NAFCOM predicted $1.7 billion when the inputs were adjusted to a more commercial development approach. Thus, the predicted the cost to develop the Falcon 9 if done by NASA would have been between $1.7 billion and $4.0 billion.

SpaceX has publicly indicated that the development cost for Falcon 9 launch vehicle was approximately $300 million. Additionally, approximately $90 million was spent developing the Falcon 1 launch vehicle which did contribute to some extent to the Falcon 9, for a total of $390 million. NASA has verified these costs.

So by "traditional methodology," it was roughly ten times more costly and even by a more refined approach, it was more than a factor of 4 more expensive. And this ignores any inflation in program costs.

I agree that SpaceX will be much cheaper than the shuttle -- especially when Blue Origin starts to offer competition, but this launch used the Dragon, not the Falcon, didn't it?. I have this vague recollection that Dragon is more capable than Falcon.

Do you even know what you are talking about? The Dragon Capusle is a spacecraft that sits, mounted, on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The Dragon can't do shit withouht the Falcon 9 vehicle. The Falcon 9 vehicle can launch payloads other than the Dragon, to be sure. However, for its first few demonstration and test flights (like that mentioned in the article) it will be flying with Dragon prototypes so that SpaceX can test out two systems at once and save itself money.

Yes yes my bad on the whole dragon-is-a-capsule thing. In my mind I was thinking of the heavier falcons versus the initial one.

If I had a point it was that there are numerous components developed and an accurate comparison of cost is going to be difficult. There's the dragon and 3 variants of the falcon (1, 9, heavy) as I understand it, all of which have development costs.

Don't get me wrong, I am psyched about SpaceX and do expect private companies to do it more cheaply

Well, lets see. The shuttle launchs 7 ppl into orbit for 1.5-3 Billion per launch. The falcon 9 will launch 7 in less than 3 years for less than $150 million.
The shuttle launches 24,500 KG to LEO for 1.5-3 Billion per launch. The Falcon Heavy will launch 54,500 KG to LEO in 2 years for 100 million.
The shuttle has a 2 week lifetime in orbit. The Falcon 9 is for no less than 30 weeks, and has claimed 104 weeks.
The shuttle can go to LEO. The Falcon Heavy can go to the moon and mars.
The shuttle CAN take u

Insurance and profit? They're not insignificant, but those aren't major "costs." There's more like a factor of ten difference in costs between current private and NASA efforts. You aren't going to cross that chasm with little costs.

In the end it will cost more than if NASA just had their own vehicle.
Really? What do you base that on? Costs for JUST THE ARES I was 9 billion and it still had a ways to go. The Orion was over 5 Billion. The Ares V was expected to cost around 20-25 billion and would not be available until 2025-2030. The launch costs for the Ares V would be similar to the shuttle (same critter; just a vertical stack instead of a side stack; same costs to launch). So, to send up 150 tonnes to leo would 1.5-3 billion (in 20

The use of the future conditional indicates full awareness that said chickens are merely hypothetical, and development from the egg stage not guaranteed, and thus any possible egg-basket-spilling dances of joy are premature.

You have a good point here about Texas. As a state, TX and FL stand to lose the most from privatized space flight because of their large aerospace industries. Although Jeff Bezos does have Blue Origin based in TX, it probably won't bring nearly as many jobs as the Johnson space center.

It is the neo-cons, not the republicans, that are attacking private space. Even now, they are attempting to get funding cut to any private space, but esp. to SpaceX. This includes Shelby(R), Hatch(R), wolf(R), Coffman(R), Hutchinson(R), and others that are pushing to stop this funding. Oddly, they argue that by moving about 800 million over to their SLS (which will costs 10-20 billion or more) that it will be able to launch in under 7 years. 800 million will not matter to the SLS, but with private space, i

Personally, I'd be kind of amused if NASA decided to allow the Dragon to dock, NASA's bureaucracy prevented it from carrying actual cargo since it's technically still a 'test', and SpaceX cut a deal with FedEx to symbolically make the first private package delivery to the ISS (with the station's Commander having final authority to approve or refuse anything brought or kept onboard, of course)

It would be interesting to see what kind of stuff the crewmembers themselves would have shipped up if they had more o

Well, they have to test docking, which was the whole point of the COTS 3 flight; so, unless there's a problem I would expect them to at least make the attempt. And, if you're going to test docking, you might as well carry something useful but non-critical along. Something like food, water, spare clothing, and so on; so, if you lose the cargo you know you're not going to impact ISS operational requirements.

I think there are two different approaches to looking at the problem of corporations lobbying governments: you can blame the corporations, or you can blame the governments.

Let's look at blaming the corporations. On the one hand, we don't want our legislators being bought with nice trips to Tahiti and such. However, can we truly prohibit companies from speaking their views (assuming they aren't bribing legislators)? As we're a country founded on freedom of speech, it seems strange to say that some entities *

It still amazes me that anyone with sense would endorse the privatization of any government entity when it has shown time and time again to become a syphon for government money.

As opposed to being a government entity which is a siphon for government money? Even in such a situation, you have a diminishing of government power. The private entity can be sued and its leaders held accountable for criminal actions. Why are you amazed again?

A large chunk of the inefficiency at NASA itself is caused by, you guessed it, privatization of capabilities and variable cost contracts. It wouldn't matter that the work was being done by contractors instead of civil servants if the companies actually had an incentive to be efficient, but they don't. SpaceX, unlike all the other contractors NASA uses, is offered fixed-price launches, meaning they bear 100% of the financial risk and have every incentive to be efficient. I can only see this as an improvem